Recording Mistakes to Avoid
This section will talk about some mistakes that we can warn you about. If you do your own recording and mixdown, this section might help you. Not that we ran into these ourselves...ok, we admit it. We did. We expect to expand this section as we continue our recording processes. Feel free to send us examples of things to avoid!
Keep your master fader at 0 during mixdown
On analog studios, you can use the master fader to make the entire mix quieter. But on digital studios, putting the master fader below 0 DB will likely act like an extremely crappy limiter. Our mastering guy pointed this out for us by showing us our recording on an oscilloscope. Most recordings are supposed to look like a ball. Ours looked like a box. It was basically cutting off frequencies past a certain point. Needless to say, this doesn't sound good.
Just leave master at 0 and then set your individual tracks accordingly. If you want the entire mix to be quieter, bring all of the individual tracks down. Check your instructions for more details as to whether this effects your equipment or not.
Record at low levels on digital recorders
The analog recorders of the past were usually taken to the redline during recording. And if they went to the limit, it would have an interesting distortion sound. Digital distortion, on the other hand, sounds terrible. Most digital recorders are very sensitive and are set to record clearly at much lower levels. We used to record our stuff much higher on our Alesis HD24 until we were told that we should actually aim for peaks at -15 db. Once we did this, it sounded much clearer and was easier to work with.